Sven-Arne wanted to say something beautiful and inspiring, but as in so many other cases his uncle pre-empted him.
‘Don’t say anything. I know what you can do. Words, words, and more words. I’m sure you still have that ability. I am glad that you came, but maybe you should have stayed where you were. There is nothing here. In India, yes… there is… what is there there, anyway?’
‘But you haven’t exactly given up and laid yourself flat on the ground.’
‘I have tried to fight back,’ Ante said. ‘But now everything is about defeat. Yes, we won a little, I am the first to admit that, but the final conclusion will not be affirming reading. And now everyone is talking about the fact that the world may be coming to an end, the ice caps are melting and we will drown like cats. That may be just as well. Everything will be ocean.’
He stopped and Sven-Arne thought for a moment that he was about to burst into tears. His upper lip trembled and his watery old-man eyes twitched.
‘I often think about a little village by the name of Forcall. There was a whole gang of us there – a Pole, some Germans, and then me. Blom was off on some errand, maybe a woman, he was always after them. You must remember Blom.’
Sven-Arne nodded. Ante’s talk was calming him down.
‘Everything was fine. Sometimes an Italian surveillance plane would go past, but everything on the ground was still. The Polack was a little hurt and one of the Germans was helping him with the bandage. We sat and talked about life. One of those times when you really get close to each other. It must have been our proximity to the Fascist positions. We had nothing to lose except our lives. I talked about Irina, the Serbian. You know, the one who made it into parliament and later became one of Tito’s trusted circle. I believed I would never see her again. It was fated that I should die in the mountains. I had been given a warning, been perforated by a grenade, but returned. I was in love with those villages.’
‘But also with Irina,’ Sven-Arne said. He had shifted his chair a little closer to Ante, who for once was speaking quietly, almost mutteringly.
‘Also with Irina,’ he echoed.
‘But you chose the villages and the conflict,’ Sven-Arne said.
Ante nodded. ‘I thought I would meet her again when I was injured the second time, but she had been transferred.’
‘You lost both the villages and her.’
Ante lifted his head and looked at his nephew.
‘Did you have a woman in India?’
‘For a while,’ Sven-Arne said. ‘But she moved on.’
‘Do you miss her?’
‘Sometimes.’
Ante nodded again. ‘Then I was captured.’
‘Where did Irina go?’
‘When the republic fell she fled to France with everyone else and ended up in a camp, Barcarès. There she met a Spaniard from Lerida, an anarchist who had fought alongside Durutti. He ended up in the Resistance movement in France, but the Germans got him and he died in Mauthausen. Irina was able to get back to Serbia.’
‘You’ve never talked about how you got yourself out.’
‘Nothing extraordinary. Bribes. I was being held with a Yankee from the Lincoln brigade, a lift technician from New York. A Jew. There were a lot of them in the republic. We managed to bribe a guard, that’s all it took. We parted ways north of Valencia, then I headed north. I had some things hidden away in a village.’
‘The children’s drawings?’
‘Among other things. You remember them?’
‘You told me about the drawings when I was a kid. What was that all about?’
‘You’ll have to read about it,’ Ante said. ‘It was a nurse from Karlstad who… but I don’t think I can go through it right now. I was just going to talk a little longer about that moment in Forcall. The Polack groaned a little. He was in pain, but it was nothing compared to what he was to experience the following day. Then he died, just like the Germans. Blom hung on for another week, then he went. He was from Hälsingland. I was the only one in the group who pulled through.’
Ante looked at Sven-Arne with moist eyes.
‘Things like that prey on your mind, you know.’
Sven-Arne had known this for fifty years, ever since that winter’s day on the roof.
‘I think about all the hopes they had. We were simple fellows, no big players. We just wanted justice. Then, when they started going on about Stalin and the camps in Siberia, what were we to think?’
Sven-Arne stretched out his hand in order to put it on Ante’s stained trouser leg but pulled it back.
They sat quietly for several minutes. The clatter of footsteps and the rattle of a passing cart could be heard from the corridor.
Sven-Arne thought about what Ante had said, that he had only been fighting for justice. It could have been used for his own part, but he felt that the words were too big, words that no longer had any grounding. Now it was too late to back up the tape and start wreaking havoc, agitating. That time was over and the fault was partly his. He had let go of his dreams and become a prisoner of his situation, and what credibility would he – a fugitive county commissioner – have? In the best-case scenario, people would laugh at him. Wouldn’t they? He hadn’t embezzled any funds and made off with the coffers, had not been bought by the money men or left on a well-paying international assignment. He had spent his time planting trees, weeding, and picking up litter. Would he be able to speak as he had used to? And perhaps some things really had changed. Perhaps people were more receptive to talk about the things that lay beyond the most immediate matters of everyday life. He knew so little about what had happened in Sweden the last decade.
Sven-Arne realised his uncle was studying him. He is reading me, he thought. To break it up he again stretched out his hand. Ante grabbed it.
‘We’re sitting on the edge of a piss-pot,’ he said. ‘We’re in a hell of a hole, aren’t we?’
His hand was bony and cold.
‘We’re in a hell of a hole,’ Sven-Arne agreed.
‘There are a couple of thousand in every generation, the five thousand worst bastards, and I am glad I’ve belonged to that bunch. That will be on my tombstone. I am an odd duck, but…’
‘In India…’
‘What about India?’
Ante sounded almost eager, but Sven-Arne shook his head and withdrew his hand.
‘Another time,’ he said, but sensed there would not be many more of those.
In the same moment that he stood up and straightened his journey-stiffened body he made his decision. Suddenly it appeared as a simple alternative, the only one really. To once again become an honourable citizen in Sweden and Uppsala was not possible and to return to India was just as unthinkable.
‘I’ll see you later,’ he said, and picked his bag up off the floor, but then he hesitated. He wanted to put his arms around the old man, who now observed in bewilderment that Sven-Arne was gripped by a sudden fervour. But he couldn’t do it. This was not because hugs had never been part of the Persson family repertoire but rather that he was convinced it would cause him to fall into an unconsolable fit of weeping. He had to stay upright and make his own decisions.
‘You’re leaving?’
Sven-Arne nodded.
‘Will you be back?’
Sven-Arne hated lying to Ante, and to top it off he was bad at it. Ante had almost always seen right through his hemmings and hawings, but this time he looked pleased when Sven-Arne explained that they would soon see each other again.
‘I just have some things to sort out again,’ Sven-Arne said from the door, and left the nursing home as unnoticed as when he arrived.
THIRTY-FOUR
One of the advantages of police work, Ann Lindell thought, was that no environment was inconceivable. For the first time in her life she stood leaning over a snowblower.
‘You have to prepare yourself,’ she heard a voice say, and turned.